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PUBLIC EDUCATION


NCLB - No Child Left Behind
OVERVIEW
Scholar Diane Ravitch Comments on NCLB (3/8/10)
Diane Ravitch (former Assistant Secretary of Education & counselor to Education Secretary Lamar Alexander under President George H.W. Bush; appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board under President Clinton) comments on:
  • academic standards versus teaching to a test;
  • charter schools and their impact on public schools;
  • respect for teachers;
  • using parent outreach and development in economically challenged communities rather than abandonment and threats of sanctioning;
  • collaboration versus competition;
  • the importance of unity in our approach to improving public education.

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Hawai'i Department of Education (HIDOE) Policies
Scool Code Regulations
Request for Government Documents
Informal requests for copies of School Code Regulations from the DOE, were ignored for months.  So, Ms. Ott finally had to resort to a formal "Request to Access Government Record" which is the process managed by the State of Hawai`i Office of Information Practices, the department that ensures compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. This document (with personal information deleted from this copy) is the formal written request Ms. Ott submitted to the Department of Education in March 2010 for the following government documents:
  • All “School Code Regulations”;

  • Policies and procedures for conducting Investigations of an HSTA member and DOE employee;

  • Policies and procedures regarding Department Directed Leave of an HSTA member and DOE employee.
Since the Department of Education does not make the school code regulations available to the public, administrators, or teachers via its web site, Ms. Ott pursued her request for school code regulations through the Office of Information Practices, and paid the required fees.  What the DOE delivered is available here.  Note that the DOE deliverd the two largest files as *.rar documents.  Fortunately, Ms. Ott had the technical ability to download a converter, and extract the *.pdf files.  The documents have been renamed from the original to be more descriptive, and contain the date of delivery.  They are not well organized, and in some cases, there are different versions of a given regulation number.  Be sure to check all the documents for the SCR you seek, and if there are two different versions, check the revision date at the bottom of a given SCR to find the most current one.  Also, be aware that these may not be the most current versions, but it's all we have from the DOE at this time. Click here to read the full text of Hawai`i Revised Statutes Chapter 92F known as the UNIFORM INFORMATION PRACTICES ACT.  This is a Microsoft Word document.

Click here to read the 3/17/10 article in West Hawaii Today regarding the Hawai`i government's open records practices.  According to the author, "The Department of Education garnered mixed grades, from a high B- to an F, reflecting clearly the varying difficulty of obtaining information from the state (F) and district level personnel (B-)."
Teachers' Rights In more than one case settled by the Hawai`i Department of Labor Relations, the following notice was attached:



Chapter 89 of the Hawai`i Revised Statutes is available in this document: HRS_Chapter_89_051906.pdf

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Ka`u District
Na`alehu SCC
Na`alehu School Community Council
Learn more about Na`alehu Elementary School Community Council at this unofficial web site.

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Mahalo!